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Katie Harbath.
Our conversation with Katie Harbath about the current and future uses of mobile in campaigns was chock-a-block with useful insights. As the chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2010, Harbath conducted a variety of fascinating experiments with mobile, and she shared lots of valuable takeaways with us.
The big ones are, first, that rising numbers of Americans are going online via their mobile device, with Pew reporting that more than one in four adult internet users did so to look up political information (see “Politics Goes Mobile”). And second, in her view, “The next campaign will be social and mobile.”
At the NRSC, which works to support Republican Senate candidates, Harbath was mostly working with independent expenditure money, which means she couldn’t directly advertise to support specific candidates. So she ran mobile ads that aimed to get email signups, drive traffic to the NRSC website, raise money and help people find their polling place around Election Day. The results:
–“Ten percent of the traffic to our site” came from mobile devices, she reported.
–The ads were cheaper to run than regular online ads and produced about half of their click-thrus.
–Raising money didn’t work all that well, whereas a lot of people used their mobile phones to look up polling information.
“People need to get away from thinking of mobile as just text-messaging,” Harbath declared. “People are giving money, uploading pictures, social networking and all kinds of other things with their mobile devices.”
If you are working on a modest budget, Harbath offered three “must-does”:
1. Make sure you have a mobile version of your website.
2. Make sure your emails are readable on mobile devices.
3. If you are using Google Analytics, look under the “advanced segments” to find out how much of your traffic is already coming from mobile sources.
Towards the end of the call, we ranged more broadly over the current landscape, and Harbath also shared some observations from her new job as one of Facebook’s representatives in Washington. The whole thing is worth a close listen.
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» Nancy Scola, techPresident The Internet’s Future: Will it be Free?
That the Internet will remain as free and open as it was designed to be looks less sure than ever. With on-going battles over net neutrality, broadband access, and online speech, what does the future look like, and how can it be changed? Nancy Scola, techPresident.com’s Associate Editor, will deep dive into the issues at hand and the future at stake.
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